I loved physics at school! I wasn't the best but I wangled my way into A level physics based on enthusiasm (and passed) and I it hit me like a bolt a few weeks back that if I hadn't done physics at scho`ol I may never have had the winding career I've had and I quite probably wouldn't have believed in energetic therapies and finally shiatsu. Why? Because I can't take things on blind faith, I need to know how they work. I recently gave a talk on this and as it was all women in the audience I asked how many had done physics at school. I was saddened that only one woman in the room had managed it to O level as I believe they have all missed out on knowing how truly wondrous our world and and everything in it is, How everything resonates on a frequency and that everything is part of the Electromagnetic Spectrum and explains why energetic therapies work so effectively. This month my Shiatsu blog: How physics and vibration explain an energetic therapy is all linked!
How physics and vibration explain an energetic therapy
Just because I did the physics doesn't mean I'm going to explain it all scientifically, I can't as I've forgotten 99.9% of it, the one bit that has always remained is that the Electromagnetic Spectrum encompasses EVERYTHING. Once you know that everything has a vibration and that the ones we can see and hear (colour and sound) are a very small percentage of the overall spectrum you then understand how there is a lot of space for other things to exist.
I portrayed this quite colourfully at my talk, I literally drew it out over 3 lengths of A3 scroll, here are some of the salient parts:
Colour we can see - 0.0035% of the overall range. That's about 3 thousandth - Tiny! If seeing is believing then it's a very very narrow-minded view of what's going on!
The colour we can't see but we take for granted - like Ultra Violet, we know to pop on sun glasses and sun screen. Infra red, we know this can warm us up via gadgets and is used in lazer treatment therapy. Lazers can be good unless you're zapped by one in a Sci Fi film!
Sound - this is a much larger percentage of the spectrum, but the part we can hear is just a fraction of it. We know dogs and bats hear more than us, so we know it's there. Sound also includes microwave (that's your mobile / cell phones), FM and AM frequencies, the old way of transmitting radio, RADAR (very handy in the military and microwave but make it too strong and it will cook you. We take all of these for granted as they are in our everyday lives, but you may not have thought that they all piece together on one big spectrum.
Radio waves are longer, slower and have less energy so they're at the bottom, and the longer they get to ELF - Extra low frequency then you'll have seen these as the giant radio telescopes that we point to the stars to listen out for E.T. We don't tend to point as many visuals telescopes as we do radio ones, we're always listening for those anomalies out there....
At the opposite end of the spectrum are the very short, intense (high photon energy!) waves, they're pretty dangerous and can penetrate through most things - you'll have heard of Gamma waves (and the Incredible Hulk!). The likes of plutonium and uranium in other words radiation that makes you feel sick or can blow things up dramatically. It's all vibration whether you can not hear it but alients are transmitting on it, sing along with it, see it in colours, or get cooked by it!
The gist is the electromagnetic spectrum encompasses EVERYTHING , including us, all life, all inanimate objects and everything vibrates at it's own specific frequency. In the human body your frequencies can get blocked, shifted, stagnated, weakened and plain screwed up. With shock and trauma you can also shift your energies out of your body, I've experience this! Luckily I have a practitioner who keeps putting my energies back where they belong!
Have you heard that humans have 7 energetic layers that emanate out from our bodies, from a few inches to around 3 feet? Etheric, Emotional, Mental, Astral, Etheric Template, Celestial and Ketheric (had to look that one up!). You may have heard of chakras too, talked about in Yoga and Reiki? These are all vibrations to do with our body, we can't see them, we can photograph Aura's so there is some proof, but we accept this more and more as it's talked about in everyday therapeutic life that these do exist and they are a part of our vibration and existence. This is why there are so many powerful holistic therapies in existence, tapping into each of the energy layers that each therapist resonates with themself. I resonate with shiatsu. It's not that it's entirely dense physical, a term I'd use for normal hands on body work), I know that shiatsu is resonating with emotions and energies that are out of kilter in your body and my modality for helping you rebalance is empathetic touch.
Where is a human being on the Electromagnetic Spectrum?
If everything in the universe is a vibration and has a frequency attached to it where are human beings and other solid matters? In fact, is anything solid? Answer = No. We just vibrate at a frequency that to us appears solid.
Look at water - it can turn from ice, through water to steam, we take that for granted. One you can sit on, one you can sink and drown in , the other can scald you and is invisible! What a perfect example of the electromagnetic spectrum playing out in front of you. You don't deny steam exists, you may not even see it, but you can feel it!
Coming back to human bodies then, we appear solid. The maths and physics of it all are complicated and that's not the point of my blog, so I'll reduce this complexity to we resonate at around 9 to 16 Hz, that's lower than radio, which is why we can't hear ourselves hum, and we don't zap people as we look at them so that means we're nowhere near microwave and infrared, and we're definitely we're not emitting Gamma rays as we wouldn't last very long at all. No we're down nearer the sounds of the universe in the part of the spectrum called Very Low Frequency VLF.
But we do vibrate to the point that we we seem solid, but we're also 75% of water and we know that changes state quite easily and it's altered by molecules speeding up (with heat).
Energetic therapies and the human body
As I mentioned earlier, we know that warming therapies help like infra read/ lazer and even applying hand warmth or a heat pad to a chronic condition helps ease pain. With acute conditions you can apply ice to relieve inflammation pain, you know all this as physical cause and effect but at the molecular level you're tapping into vibrations, calming a heated one and warming a cold stagnant one to move again.
In shiatsu it is the latter that is the most effective for long term benefits, working to shift chronic conditions that have become blocked, cold and sedantry causing discomfort, aches and ailments. People marvel that some therapeutic warmth and stimulation in the right places can make them feel so much better. Everyone says they feel better after a massage but a lot of the time that's echoed with ...but not for long. This is because though a massage is therapeutic with the warming of muscles and blood flow it's not tailored for specific issues, most of which lie in the emotional rather than physical realm. Massage just goes at it and can trample over the delicacy of feelings that are trapped within. Are emotions an energetic vibration? Well yes they are and they resonate with specific organs.
Anger is a clear emotional that stuffers up the smooth running of your liver, it causes it to stutter even to stagnate; this is from the basic organ theory in Traditional Chinese Medicine. Once anger or one of it's resonating associates (resentment, frustration, bitterness, jealousy) interferes energetically in the body you can start to experience a host of symptoms from irritability to shooting random pain, nausea, headaches and heartburn (that's just a short example). In talking about the energetics of the body I often talk about physical fluids like blood and lubrication, as this the physical manifestation but they resonate at their own frequencies and can be picked up on anything from Bioresonance machines to Bach Flower Remedies.
Energies whether in a human or animal body, or plants, or sound and colour are all exmaples of vibrations at a particular frequency on the electromagnetic spectrum.
Rebalancing your vibrations
We don't need to know the frequencies in shiatsu treatments to affect change, just to know that these are body energetics and a vibration, and if you're feeling unwell then something is off kilter. I've recently been learning about Bioresonance and a lot of ill health frequencies have been extensively mapped. Bioresonance works by reading the body, knowing the healthy frequencies and picking up those that are out of balance and retuning them. It's deeply powerful, and I believe very helpful in uncovering deep imbalances at a molecular level in your body that cause autoimmune issues and deeply held chronic ill health.
Then there are plant energetics that can step in and help us emotionally and physically, the main ones are Essential oils, Bach Flower Remedies and Homeopathy. Each of these modalities is working on very subtle but known resonances i.e. it is known which plant will resolve what issue, they work again at a deep level within your body, not just resolving the symptom but working to rebalance the underlying cause.
I'm finding great results with Bach Flowers alongside Shiatsu for people and with essential oils for dogs.
Another modality I love is sound healing, I experienced my Gong Bath last year and feeling those intense vibrations washing over me was an amazing sensation. I regulary nip onto you tube and choose a healing frequency for something specific like heart, or throat and the weirdest sounds -for the liver! Recently I was given a chant by Monks and Leela came and curled up next to me and I zoned out. It's a weird one but check it out if you fancy some brain retuning!
In Chinese medicine around 90% of known issues are caused by emotions; external toxins like poisons create very few of our everyday ailments. However in modern life toxins that come at us from all directions are affecting more and more issues within the body that when then mixed with emotions are magnifying and becoming horrible illnesses. There is plenty that can be done to reduce external toxicity as much as you can, but the real power comes from working on yourself to make you more physically robust and able to bat away these toxins rather than harbour them for a disease later on.
You most likely consider toxins as physical but not emotions, so how do these 2 completely different entities combine to create illness? Answer = they are both vibration, they can interfere to unbalance the healthy working of your body. You're 100% vibration, your emotions are vibrations that attach to different organs and external toxins are vibrations that have entered the system. Take a virus, 2 people related can get the same virus but have different symptoms and outcomes, even though genetically they're about 99% the same.
Emotions and Organs
I mentioned above that your main emotions resonate with the main organs in your body, this is a model I work with every day as it's powerful and it works in helping me treat clients. It's always interesting to know that if you have an undealt with emotion where in your body it maybe taking hold:
Liver - Anger
Lungs - Grief, sadness
Spleen - Worry
Kidney - Fear
Heart - Joy gone wrong
Maybe you've had a trauma recently and shocked you, it will reach to your heart energy leaving you feeling very shaky and emotionally, it may leave you fearful, reaching your Kidneys. If there is a loss then your lungs become involved, and this will embed for a long time. You may then go through an anger phase and be left worrying and fearful of the future. Knowing that your emotions affect the main organ energies in your body means you can take steps to relieve the trauma that's reverberating throughout your being. In TCM we learn the symptoms that are associated with these organs and this can lead back to the underlying emotions.
Recently as I've been studying Bach Flower Remedies more indepth and came across a fantastic book: Bach Flower Essences and Chinese Medicine (Pablo Noriega) I'm learning how to blend specific remedies together to help rebalance deeply imbalanced energies in the body. Ones that run so chronic that along with Shiatsu help a person really turn around deeply held energetic patterns in their body; that manifest in behaviours, thought patterns and illnesses.
All energetics are vibrations, your health and emotions are vibrations. Physical things, solid items, illness are all vibrations. Therefore energetic/ vibrational therapies work to gently rebalance. Western medicine is vibrational too but the difference with pharmaceuticals is that they are not a natural vibration anymore, they've been taken into a lab dissected, added to and the result though may help certain conditions comes with a lot of side effects. These meds rarely treat the underlying condition, only the apparent symptom. They can't treat the underlying condition for 2 reasons: western medicine doesn't really consider emotions as the basis of illness and it doesn't treat anything it can't see. If there isn't a result in a blood test or on a scan, in western medicine it doesn't exists.
In Eastern medicine and plant medicine we go subtle, if you say you're ill it doesn't matter if the scans can't find proof, we know that if you're feeling it, it's there and it can be rebalanced. When I get a phone call from someone, that is unwell but has been told nothing is showing up so there's nothing to resolve, they are distressed understandably. I say: this is good news! It's got to be pretty bad to be picked up with western testing so though you are ill, we can turn this around. When an illness is in the energetic realm we say that it is prior to necrosis, i.e. some sort of visible cellular deatlh. The easiest one to explain is a heart attack, myocardial infarction - some of the heart muscle has died. However leading up to a heart attack there will have been inbalances, may the person was irritable all the time, or had high blood pressure, there would have been signs; it's just how subtle the signs were and whether the person was listening, most likely not!
Rebalance your health before it becomes illness, with shiatsu
Shiatsu is very much about prevention of illness. Yes, most people come with an ailment, it's a rare person that phones up and says I just want to be healthy! However once through the door with and initial issue don't then just stop because you're feeling better in the moment or because the symptom has gone. The likelihood is that it will come back, and keep doing so until you resolve the absolutely underlying imbalance and this will be emotional.
Most of us don't ever completely get to the root of it all, I've been receiving shiatsu for 20 years and I still have my anxiety and stress, but that's not the point as stress will always be in my life; and yours. The point is keeping it in check, keeping ahead of it, being proactive in your health physically and really importantly mentally. These 2 are symbiotic and can't be separated, though western medicine will again try severing psychology completely from your body. Don't worry though eastern medicine in its wisdom completely entwines psychology into the physiology because it knows and has confirmed this with 3000 plus years of experience that this is what sentient beings require.
It is in knowing that everything is a vibration whether good or bad that answers how energetic therapies work. Whether body based, emotionally based, plant based or spiritually based (like Reiki, Lightbody) any natural way of changing how you feel emotionally, physically or spiritually is therapeutically good for you.
My hope is that more and more people wake up to energetic therapies to bring the momentum to changing health for the better, back into the hands of powerful and natural ways of healing on all levels. And there is no better way to introduce yourself to this new world than shiatsu - gentle finger pressure that leaves you feeling like you've had a whole body massage but with highly therapeutic benefits.
About Andrea at Shiatsu Bodyworks Cheltenham
Andrea is a qualified zen shiatsu and chinese medicine practitioner with over 20 years immersed in holistic therapies and the energetics of mind and body. Based in Cheltenham, UK she offers in house clinic and online shiatsu sessions to help people with midlife health issues and also offers online consultations as she is a menopause specialist too.
